From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer Analyzed All of These Domestic Surveillance Issues 15 Years Ago

Imagine you’re a bad person up to no good.

Maybe you’re a terrorist who wants to harm or kill many, many Americans, or perhaps you’re a foreign spy attempting to steal U.S. secrets, in an effort to that may someday harm many Americans if your country and the United States go to war.

If you were one of these folks, and you weren’t, say, the dullest knife in the drawer . . . wouldn’t you already presume that the National Security Agency was already grabbing your signals from your cellular phone out of the air? Wouldn’t you presume that the moment they connected a particular e-mail address with you, they could crack the password and look through it with impunity? (All of this presumes you don’t have some sort of special encryption technology from your home country’s intelligence service.) Wouldn’t you assume that they were tracking the GPS in your phone? In every fugitive-on-the-run-from-a-sinister-government-conspiracy movie, the first thing the good guy does is smash his cell phone.

Haven’t these guys ever seen Enemy of the State? It came out in 1998, featured Will Smith and Gene Hackman.

All of Gene Hackman’s dialogue is more or less the actual domestic surveillance system we’ve seen unveiled in recent days:

“The government’s been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties! They’ve infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls… Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It’s a brave new world out there. At least it’d better be.”

“Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You’re talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word ‘bomb,’ ‘president,’ ‘Allah,’ any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.”

“In the old days, we actually had to tap a wire into your phone line. Now with calls bouncing off satellites, they snatch ‘em right out of the air.”

This was fifteen years ago, guys. Sure, it’s Hollywood, but this wasn’t supposed to be science fiction taking place in the far future. (Okay, the implausibly heterosexual lingerie store in Dupont Circle may qualify as science fiction.) . . . 

The last lines of the movie are from then-CNN host Larry King, who asks his fictional government official guest, “How do we draw the line — draw the line between protection of national security, obviously the government’s need to obtain intelligence data, and the protection of civil liberties, particularly the sanctity of my home? You’ve got no right to come into my home!”

Or course, Larry King works for the Kremlin now.

But the point is that while it’s good that the American public has a better idea of what the federal government can do with our phone records, e-mails, social network usage, and so on, in the name of protecting us . . . is it really that plausible that our enemies had no idea that this sort of thing was going on? If you’re FSB (the Russians) or VEVAK (the Iranians) or with the foreign affairs bureau of China’s Ministry of State Security . . . wouldn’t you already be operating on the presumption that the NSA had amazing abilities in penetrating, monitoring, and eavesdropping on every last method of electronic communication?

Don’t get me wrong, Snowden violated his oath and broke the law, and ought to see the inside of a courtroom, where a judge or jury could decide whether his crimes were committed in service of a greater good. But maybe Montana Democrat Jon Tester — not one of my favorite lawmakers — is hitting the right tone here:

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) on Wednesday rejected the notion that Edward Snowden compromised the country’s security when he leaked details of top secret National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Appearing on MSNBC, the Montana Democrat also said he disagreed with Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who argued that journalists who report on intelligence leaks should be punished.Tester said Snowden “probably shouldn’t have done what he did” but doubted that the disclosures undermined national security. In fact, Tester said he found the recent revelations — reported on by both The Guardian and The Washington Post — to be helpful.

“The information that they wrote about was just the fact that NSA was doing broad sweeps of foreign and domestic phone records, metadata. First of all, Snowden probably shouldn’t have done what he did. But the fact of the matter is I don’t see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever,” Tester said. “And quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn’t aware of before because I don’t sit on that Intelligence Committee.”

Oh, by the way, President Obama’s defense of these programs last Friday asserted, “Now, the programs that have been discussed over the last couple of days in the press are secret in the sense that they’re classified, but they’re not secret in the sense that, when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.”

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies — the independent 501(c)(4)  group with ties to former Bush strategist Karl Rove and former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie — launched a new round of television advertising that targets five U.S. senators in key states on the issue of excessive government spending and debt. New TV spots begin running today through August 6 on network television stations in Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Ohio, and will be complemented by targeted online advertising in those states.

The ads aim to sway U.S. Senators Bill Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Here’s the Missouri one:

The Florida ad can be viewed here, the Montana ad here, the Nebraska ad here, and the Ohio ad here. 

Although to be fair, President Obama isn’t exactly asking for a “blank” check; he just wants a check for $2.4 trillion, for the next eighteen months or so.

For those who follow national politics, the premier race in Montana in 2012 will be Republican Denny Rehberg’s bid to unseat Democratic senator Jon Tester; in a presidential year, Rehberg has, at the very least, a decent shot of winning the seat. But it sounds like Montana’s other big statewide race, for governor, is attracting a crowd on both sides of the aisle:

Democratic Sen. Larry Jent of Bozeman says he will be running for governor in 2012 . . . Jent is an attorney who served in the state House from 2001 to 2006 and the state Senate since then. The former Army officer said he wants to continue the sort of fiscal policies seen under Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

Another Democratic state senator, Dave Wanzenried of Missoula, also is running while Attorney General Steve Bullock says he may run for governor.

The Republican side is even more crowded, with former congressman Rick Hill facing off against former state senators Ken Miller of Laurel and Corey Stapleton of Billings. Washington, D.C., security consultant Neil Livingstone and Chouteau County Commissioner Jim O’Hara.

Schweitzer currently enjoys high approval ratings, which will probably be helpful to the Democrat who seeks to follow him.

Few Democrat wins in 2006 were less expected than Jon Tester’s defeat of three-term incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns by roughly 3,500 votes, or one percent, in Montana. Burns’ connection to the Abramoff scandal, his tendency for embarrassing gaffes, and a national Democratic wave led the crew-cutted favorite of the Daily Kos crew to an upset victory.

Rep. Denny Rehberg, a 6-term House Republican, is expected to take on Tester this year in one of the GOP’s best shots to knock off an incumbent Democrat senator. A release from Rehberg’s office stated, “Denny has received a lot of support and encouragement to run for the United States Senate in 2012. He is weighing all of his options carefully and will announce his decision Saturday.” Because Montana has only one House seat, he’s already effectively run statewide every two years, garnering no less than 59 percent of the vote every cycle since 2002. He won 60 percent of the vote in 2010.

The presidential race should help the Republican candidate in the Senate race, but it’s worth noting that Montana was surprisingly close in 2008: McCain 50 percent, Obama 47 percent. In 2004, Bush won here by 20 percentage points.